Health outcomes are determined by both genetic and environmental factors. Social factors, including elements like socioeconomic status, education, community support, access to healthcare, and social networks, are a critical type of environmental factor that shape individuals’ lifestyles, stress levels, and health behaviours, impacting both physical and mental well-being. A comprehensive understanding on the impact of social factors is therefore important in developing effective interventions and promoting health equity across populations. However, the genetic and environmental factors interact and contribute to the disease in a complex, non-additive manner, making it challenging to isolate the effects of a single factor. In recent years, the advancements in human genome sequencing and the widely applied genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous disease susceptibility genes, providing not only a deeper insight into the genetic mechanism of a disease, but also a clearer view to study the role of environmental determinants by separating the effects of genetic predispositions.
Based upon the large-scale biomedical database from the UK Biobank, this study aims to investigate the influence of social factors on health outcomes in the context of minimized genetic effects by adjusting for known disease susceptibility genes. We will extract social environmental factors from the sociodemographic and locational information of participants in UK Biobank and correlate them with the long-term disease outcomes. Mechanistic study will focus on how social factors affect health management behaviours, such as smoking and alcohol consumption, diet and physical activity, medication usage and preventive health behaviours. To minimize the genetic interference, the known disease susceptibility gene variants will be considered in statistic analysis. The expect results of this study will provide novel insights into the role of social factors in health manangement.